The PC release of Batman: Arkham Knight has thus far been a darkly fascinating tale of stupidity, consumer victory and some more stupidity. In fact the game was in such a poor state, thanks to being developed by Iron Galaxy Studios, a company that usually works on console releases, that Warner Bros. made the unprecedented move of taking the game off of Steam entirely until it met what they deemed to be their quality standards. It was a big win for the consumers who managed to make a vast publisher back down, and it was quite likely made possible thanks to the new Steam policy of being able to claim a refund within a week provided you’ve not played for more than three hours.

In a post to the official community forums today a Warner Bros. rep stated that in regards to fixing the game, “The work is significant and while we are making good progress on improving performance, it will take some time to ensure that we get the right fixes in place.”

These fixes will include:

– Support for frame rates above 30FPS in the graphics settings menu

– Fix for low resolution texture bug

– Improve overall performance and framerate hitches

– Add more options to the graphics settings menu

– Improvements to hard drive streaming and hitches

– Address full screen rendering bug on gaming laptop

– Improvements to system memory and VRAM usage

– NVIDIA SLI bug fixes

– Enabling AMD Crossfire

– NVIDIA and AMD updated drivers
Meanwhile a new patch has been released which fixes the following things:

– Fixed a crash that was happening for some users when exiting the game

– Fixed a bug which disabled rain effects and ambient occlusion. We are actively looking into fixing other bugs to improve this further

– Corrected an issue that was causing Steam to re-download the game when verifying the integrity of the game cache through the Steam client

– Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when turning off Motion Blur in BmSystemSettings.ini. A future patch will enable this in the graphics settings menu

So here’s the important question; if the problems are significant and will take time to fix, why in the name of Hades’ himself was the game ever released in such a pitiful state?